As a mature industrial technology, ore sorting technology has existed for nearly 100 years. With the fact that the reserves of rich ore resources reduce gradually, however, the problem of serious waste of ore resources still occurs in the existing ore sorting technology and equipment.
In the current ore sorting industry, the equipment usually solely screens and purifies one mineral with a relatively high content, and discards other minerals, as a tailings waste, with relatively low contents, without purifying various metallic minerals in the tailings again, which causes wastage of a large amount of useful and valuable metallic minerals and thus causes pollutions to surroundings due to the stocking of the large amount of tailings.
In the respect of tailings processing, no effective resource renovation and resource recovery equipment has been proposed. Generally, the tailings refers to the waste discharged after the ore is ground and the useful components are extracted in an ore treatment plant under specific technical conditions, that is, the tailings refers to solid waste material after concentrates are sorted from ores. The tailings are main components in the industrial solid waste material which contains a certain amount of useful metallic and non-metal minerals. Taken as a mineral material such as a compound silicate, carbonate, or the like, the tailings have the characteristics of fine granularity, large quantities, and will induce pollutions and environmental hazard.
The tailings in China are mostly stored in a tailing dam by a natural bulk method. This kind of storage occupies much land and pollutes the mining area and its surroundings, causing potential safety hazards, also wastes a large amount of valuable metal and non-metal resources, so as to become a severe obstacle to mine development. Therefore, there is in urgent need of an effective disposal process to comprehensively utilize the tailings resource and reduce emissions, which could makes wastes profitable, thereby improving ecological environments, increasing resource utilization rate, and promoting the sustainable development of mining industries.